Announcements

Haskell-Embedded System Design:
ForSyDe 3.0 and Tutorial. Alfonso Acosta
announced
the 3.0
release of ForSyDe.
The ForSyDe (Formal System Design) methodology has been developed with
the objective to move system design (e.g. System on Chip, Hardware and
Software systems) to a higher level of abstraction. ForSyDe is implemented
as a Haskell-embedded behavioral DSL (Domain Specific Language). The 3.0
release includes a new deep-embedded DSL and embedded compiler, as well
as a new user-friendly tutorial.

Graphalyze-0.1. Ivan Miljenovic
announced
the initial release of his graph-theoretic analysis library, Graphalyze.
This is a pre-release of the library he is writing for his mathematics
honours thesis, "Graph-Theoretic Analysis of the Relationships in Discrete
Data".

A Functional Implementation of the Garsia-Wachs Algorithm. Nicolas
Pouillard
announced
a Haskell
implementation of an algorithm that builds a binary tree with
minimum weighted path length from weighted leaf nodes given in symmetric
order. This can be used to build optimum search tables, to balance a
'ropes' data structure in an optimal way.

graphviz-2008.9.20. Ivan Miljenovic
announced
a new version of Matthew
Sackman's Haskell bindings to Graphviz. See Ivan's original announcement
for information on what new features are included, and what the difference
is among the various graphviz-related packages on Hackage.

darcs 2.1.0pre2. Eric Kow
announced
the release of darcs 2.1.0pre2, formerly known as 2.0.3. See Eric's
announcement for a list of new features and bug fixes in this release.

protocol-buffers-0.2.9 for Haskell is ready. ChrisK
announced
the release of the protocol-buffers
package, which generates Haskell data types that can be converted back
and forth to lazy ByteStrings that interoperate with Google's generated
code in C++/Java/python.

panda blog engine. Jinjing Wang
announced
the release of panda,
a simple blog engine written in Haskell.

OpenSPARC project applicant chosen. Duncan Coutts
announced
that Ben Lippmeier has been chosen for the OpenSPARC project. Ben will
spend three months hacking on GHC to make it perform well on the latest
multi-core OpenSPARC chips.

Hugs on the iPhone. Alberto Galdo
announced
that he has gotten Hugs to run on the iPhone, and has made packages
available for others who would like to install it as well.

Discussion

Shooting yourself in the foot in Haskell. John
Van Enk
asked
how to shoot yourself in the foot with Haskell, with humorous results.

Total Functional Programming in Haskell. Jason Dagit
started a discussion
on total functional programming, Haskell, abstraction boundaries and the
IO monad, and related topics.

Health effects. Andrew Coppin
told a story
about a chocolate bar and recursion, which led to a discussion of
optimization problems, Dedekind cuts, some meta-discussion of the
discussion, and entirely too many puns.

The container problem. Andrew Coppin
asked
about the possibility if abstracting over various sorts of containers
in Haskell, and why there isn't a widely used library that does this. A
discussion of various container libraries and the language issues that
arise followed.

Red-Blue Stack. Matthew Eastman
asked
how to implement a certain data structure (red-blue stacks) in
Haskell. Several people responded with increasingly clever solutions,
and a comparison of mutating vs. non-mutating algorithms.

Climbing up the shootout.... Don Stewart
began a long and ongoing discussion
about improving Haskell's performance on benchmarks in the Shootout,
now that there is a quad core machine for running benchmarks!

Line noise. Andrew Coppin
started an interesting
discussion about perceptions of Haskell syntax by programmers who
aren't familiar with it.

Jobs

London FP job in asset management. Michael Bott
announced
an opportunity for two functional programmers based in London, with a
software house specialising in asset management.

Creighton Hogg: One
last thought on laziness. In Creighton's opinion,
laziness is the single hardest thing to get used to in
Haskell. If you're learning Haskell, don't despair, break out
the pencil and paper!